About
www.about.com
Formerly known as The Mining Company, About is a large Internet
directory.

above the fold
With reference to the top part of a newspaper, the term
is used on the Net to describe the top part of the page
that the user can see without scrolling down.

acquisition
A term used in Internet marketing to describe the point
at which a visitor becomes a qualified lead / customer.
Generally this is the point where the visitor
· buys a product or
· provides contact details and indicates an interest in
the product or
· subscribes to a newsletter.

acquisition cost
Total cost of an advertising / marketing campaign divided
by the number of visitors (visitor acquisition cost) or
divided by the number of customers (customer acquisition
cost). Monitoring of acquisition cost is an important factor
in effective PPC advertising.

adjacency
Referring to the relationship between words, particularly
words used in a search engine query. Search engines typically
assign higher value to pages where the search terms appear
next to one another (as in the query) than to pages where
the search terms are separated by other words.

adjacent searching
see proximity

ad broker
An Internet advertising specialist. Ad brokers act as middlemen
between web site owners with advertising space to sell and
advertisers.

ad inventory
The number of potential page views a site has available
for advertising.

AdSense
Google's contextual based ad program.

advanced search
An option at most of the major search engines that allow
users to specify certain search criteria. For example, users
can elect to see only documents added to the database after
a certain date, documents in specific languages etc.

AdWords
Google's PPC program.

affiliate program / affiliate link
Affiliate programs allow other people to sell your products
on a commission basis. All your affiliates really do is
place link to your site. When a visitor arrives at your
site, your affiliate program "makes a note" of
the site that referred him. If a visitor buys something
and the referring site belongs to one of your affiliates,
you pay that affiliate either a percentage of the sale or
a fixed amount - according to your agreement.

agent name delivery
Different pages can be presented at the same URL. Different
pages are delivered based on the agent name requesting the
page. Typically, agent names starting with "Mozilla"
indicate regular browsers while search engine spiders use
names like Googlebot, Scooter etc. Agent Name Delivery is
not a very effective form of cloaking though. Search engines
can (and do) disguise spiders as "Mozilla" agents.
Also see cloaking, IP delivery.

algorithm
Algorithms are sets of rules according to which search engines
rank web pages. Figuring out the algorithms is a major part
of SEO. The thinking is that if you understand how they
calculate relevance, you can make specific pages on your
site super relevant for specific search terms. For more
on algorithms and SEO in general, please refer to the Search
Engine Yearbook.

algorithmic search
A term often used in the financial community to distinguish
between algorithm-based search engines like Google and payment-driven
search engines like Overture. The term is slightly confusing.
All search engines - including Overture - has some form
of algorithm working behind the scenes.

AliWeb
www.aliweb.com
An Internet directory.

allintitle
A special search command for Google. A search for allintitle:widget
would only return sites that has the word "widget"
in the title.

allinurl
A special search command for Google. A search for allinurl:widget
would only return sites that has the word "widget"
in the URL.

AllTheWeb
www.alltheweb.com
A very large search engine, gaining in stature and popularity.
At this stage (2002) it seems to be the top contender for
Google's throne. In a study by Pandecta Magazine, conducted
in the 4th quarter of 2002, AllTheWeb was estimated to have
the second largest database (after Google). It also did
well in relevancy test: 3rd after Google and Wisenut. It
lost out in the speed test though. It came in last. For
more details on that study, AllTheWeb and the other search
engines worth knowing about, please refer to the Search
Engine Yearbook.

AltaVista
www.altavista.com
Pioneering search engine purchased by Overture in February
of 2003.

Last edited - Feb 21, 2003
by Mike Valentine of http://www.searchengineoptimism.com
For a detailed look at AltaVista and the other major search
engines, please refer to the Search Engine Yearbook.

alt attribute
More commonly known as the "alt tag". The alt
attribute is an HTML element specified within an image tag.
The syntax is:
<IMG SRC="main-logo.gif" ALT="Pandecta
Logo">
The text in the alt attribute, "Pandecta Logo"
in this example, will be displayed in the place of the image
"main-logo.gif" while the image loads or if the
user has images turned off. In most browsers the text also
appears as a "tool tip" when the user hovers the
mouse pointer over the image after it has loaded.
Creating an alt attribute for images is not required, but
recommended since the alt text is factored into the algorithms
of most search engines.

alt tag
Common name (erroneous) for the alt attribute.

alt text
Text specified in the alt attribute.

anchor text
Also called link text, referring to the text that appears
in a text link. For example, if I link to the Pandecta Magazine
web site like this: Click here, then "Click here"
is the anchor text for the link. Some search engines - notably
Google - take anchor text into account when ranking sites.
It is therefore beneficial to have keywords in the anchor
text of links pointing to your site.

applet
A small application, usually in Java, usually for use on
the Web.

ArchitextSpider
The name of the Excite search engine's spider.

Ask Jeeves
www.askjeeves.com
A fairly popular search engine. Its claim to fame is that
it lets you to enter plain text questions as opposed to
only keywords. Ask Jeeves receives search results from Teoma,
Overture and ODP.